Australia announces referendum to recognize indigenous people in constitution

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Australia announces referendum to recognize indigenous people in constitution

November 8, 2010 12:09:13 pm

[JURIST] Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard [official website] on Monday announced a national referendum [press release] that seeks to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Australian Constitution [materials]. Currently, although Aborigines make up almost three percent of the Australian population, they are not mentioned in the Constitution. The referendum will be among Australia’s first steps in efforts to build strong relationships of trust and mutual respect among the natives and the rest of Australia. In the statement, made jointly with Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin [official profile], the two officials stressed the need to incorporate native peoples into Australia’s founding document:

Recognition will demonstrate that we are a country that is united in acknowledging the unique and special place of our first peoples. The Government is pursuing an ambitious agenda to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage, including undertaking major reform and delivering unprecedented investment in early education, health, jobs, housing and services, and infrastructure. Formal recognition in our foundation document will build on this work by publicly acknowledging our history and the significant contribution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continue to make to this nation.

As part of the process, Gillard and Macklin announced the formation of an expert panel to pose amendment changes that will appeal to the majority of Australians. The Australian Human Rights Commission [official website] voiced support [press release] for such a panel, calling it a “sensible approach” to ensuring that there is a broad pool of views needed to get a consensus on the proposed constitutional changes. The panel is expected to report back to the government [AFP report] with proposed options by the end of 2011 in time for voting to occur in line with the 2013 election.

In recent years, the Australian government has recognized the long history of discrimination and disadvantage among its native citizens, although its efforts have not always resulted in better conditions. In August, Amnesty International Australia (AIA) criticized the racial discrimination [JURIST report] that exists in Australia, which, according to AIA, violates the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [texts]. In June, the Australian government reinstated its previously suspended Racial Discrimination Act [JURIST report] in the Northern Territory, which allows governmental authorities to regulate how welfare money is spent by the indigenous people of the country. In March, UN special rapporteur James Anaya condemned the law [press release], calling it problematic from a human rights point of view. Last year, Australia endorsed [JURIST report] the aforementioned Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which reversed the position held by previous Australian governments. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd championed the cause of improved living conditions for and relations with Australia’s indigenous population during his term in office, and offered and official apology on behalf of the federal government in February 2008 for past mistreatment to the nation’s indigenous population.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.